


The Last of Her

by BattleFruit1300



Series: The Last of Her [2]
Category: The Last of Us (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Apocalypse, Canon-Typical Violence, Graphic Description of Corpses, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-13 00:08:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29019456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BattleFruit1300/pseuds/BattleFruit1300
Summary: Sixteen year old Riley Abel, a fresh faced Firefly right out of training, just lost her best friend to the Cordyceps infection. Having been bitten herself, she had to put Ellie down when she met the fate meant for the both of them. Now she has to come to terms with being the last hope for humanity, and get to Salt Lake City Utah in order to help her organization develop a vaccine. However, things don't go to plan, and she'll have to get there alone. Can she make it across the country by herself, and can she do it without losing the hope in a brighter future that drove her to the Fireflies?
Series: The Last of Her [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1921858
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	The Last of Her

**Author's Note:**

> The prologue was just an idea that I had, but I sat down and planned out an entire full length journey for Riley because I couldn't stop thinking about how it would be different from the game experience. Disclaimer: this story comes with original characters and a carefully plotted route through the U.S. that is completely different from Joel and Ellie's. This is not going to be the story retold with Riley in Ellies place, this is going to be Riley's story as I think it would play out. Her struggles and conflicts, internal and external, are going to be reflective of her past traumas (see comics) or completely original in a way that I think fits the universe that The Last of Us built. I know that isn't everyone's cup of tea, so I thought I would spare a few people some time. If this IS your cup of tea, please enjoy it. This first chapter is a bit of an introduction, other chapters will be longer.

“You’re leaving in a week”

Riley looked at Marlene for a few moments with a hard expression.

“No”, came her insistent reply, “I want to leave now. If there’s even a chance that what happened to me can create a cure, I want to go as soon as possible.”

“We’ve already talked about this; it isn’t as simple as that. We need time, a plan, an extraction team in place. We aren’t going to get another shot at this Riley” Marlene spoke placatingly but firmly, and truth be told somewhat impatiently. Marlene was not taking the news of Ellies death well, and despite not saying so, she clearly blamed Riley. Maybe fairly, Riley thought. She had told her to stay away from Ellie. 

“That’s what you told me three days ago, and I’ve already waited a week! If we wait any longer, I’m not going to make it out of the city before we’re all dead!” She replied, getting progressively less patient. The Fireflies were losing more men than they could replace every day, as made evident by the ever-lowering recruitment age. She just needed to get herself outside the quarantine zone before they found themselves pinned down.

Marlene looked contemplative. She wanted to argue, but knew that they were losing. They needed warm, willing bodies and enough weapons to make them useful, neither of which they had. A monopoly on a vaccine, a REAL vaccine, could turn the tide of the rebellion in their favor in every QZ with a Firefly presence, but if Riley was caught and scanned, the soldiers would execute her. She opened her mouth to respond when she heard gunfire in the distance, answering for her. They needed to move back, again.

Taking a deep breath, and releasing it with a long-suffering sigh, she relented: “Fine. You’re leaving tonight, we’ll figure it out.”

Riley smiled.  
•

The dusk hung heavy over the gray buildings. When she was still in school, well, “school”, she used to try and imagine what they looked like before the world came to an end, but with the nighttime creeping over the cracking plaster of the walls, any distinctions between the towering structures were washed out in a dull veil of shadows. Marlene had assigned her three “escorts”, meant to move her from Boston to the Albany QZ. Apparently, the Fireflies had been having slightly better luck there, and they should have a vehicle to spare and a larger envoy to take her to “Salt Lake City”. She thought the name was ridiculous, but she supposed that changing the signs now was out of the question. The plan itself was to get far enough outside of the city to make contact with the Albany QZ and get a pickup sometime tomorrow.

The two women and the man that had been assigned to her trip were quiet, keeping her between them and instructing her every now and then to get down, keep up, or be silent. She had her own gun and maps of course, but Marlene had insisted upon moving her like one does a crate of rations, or a prisoner. Not that the Fireflies took many of those. She suspected that their sour moods had something to do with the relatively short notice they received about the 170-mile trip ahead of them. The girl had requested a few people that she was familiar with at the very least, but they had been deemed essential for some gun deal that Marlene was negotiating in the morning. The plan had been poorly cobbled together with no small measure of desperation, and packing for what could end up being a 3-day trek in the span of a few hours was demanding at best. Riley was so lost in thought that when the women in front of her stopped to move a sewer cap, she damn near tripped over her.  
The woman scowled up at her, but had either the decency or the apathy not to mention her mistake out loud. She grunted, prying up the heavy disc up with some kind of bar and sliding it as gently as possible to her right.

“Well?” she said, gesturing to the now open manhole with her head, “Get in”. 

“…seriously?”

Riley took her silence and raised eyebrow as a “yes”, and bit her tongue about the possibility of climbing into a narrow tunnel that may or may not be full of human shit-water. She adjusted her backpack, kneeled down, and readied herself to drop down into the passage below (with no small amount of disgust). Seeing her less than thrilled expression, the woman was kind enough to take pity and offer her a hand. With only a small injury to her ego, Riley took it and allowed herself to be lowered a little before landing on the tunnel floor. Pleasantly surprised, she made note of how dry it was. It must’ve been the lack of summer rainfall, she deduced, otherwise there’s no way her shoes wouldn’t be squelching right now. She took a step back as the Fireflies dropped down after her.

“Look kid”, the previously silent man in the group started “We’re gonna take this storm drain out the west side of the city, towards Lexington. Once we get outside the wall, we still have to clear the patrolled zone. Stay behind Nichols, stay in front of me and Bingham, and if shit hits the fan, run. You got me?”

The idea of being treated like something delicate rubbed her the wrong way, but Riley knew what was at stake. Swallowing her pride for the second time today, she relented.

At Riley’s serious nod, the man smiled and replied, “Good. Head out. Nichols, you got the map? Take point”. 

“Nichols” flicked on a flashlight to fight the suffocating dark, while the other woman, Bingham presumably, replaced the cover. Now, Riley was by no means afraid of the dark, in fact if you asked her, she would tell you that she isn’t afraid of anything. That didn’t stop the shivers from making their way up her spine as she watched the last slivers of the dusks dim light disappear.  
Turning on her own light, Riley really looked around for the first time. The pipes were much larger than she thought they would be, but if she remembered correctly, the system under Boston was old even before the outbreak. The brick had clearly seen better days, though if she had to guess, so had everything in the city at some point. It was seemingly endless, and old, with a million bricks laying around waiting to be thrown at anything fragile. Ellie would have loved it. 

If Riley had been brave enough months ago, Ellie could’ve loved it in person, and they could’ve left together like she’d wanted them to. Riley had been so convinced that they would have died outside of the QZ, and so convinced that being a firefly had to be better than being a soldier or civilian. She wanted freedom from the entire system itself, and she was willing to kill and die in the name of it. There were a million ways that she could’ve saved her, she thought. She took all the wrong risks and Ellie paid for it. Now she was too late, and the only way she could save Ellie was to keep that last little piece of her alive in her memory. It was with a sad little pang in her chest that she realized that she was only one of two living people who would ever miss her. If everything went to plan, there was a chance that nobody would ever have to worry about being bit again. That would mean that she hadn’t lived for nothing. It would mean that Ellie hadn’t died for nothing. At the thought, Riley’s hand involuntarily hovered above the knife in her pocket.

Eventually, the hollow echoes of footsteps became maddening to the point that Riley couldn’t maintain the suffocating silence surrounding the uneven rhythms. She had no idea how long they had been walking, and she was ready to get out, or scream at the very least. At the risk of embarrassing herself, however, she kept whatever witty remarks she wanted to break the tension with to herself. 

•

It seemed like the tunnel was never-ending, and they had to have been walking for at least six hours! Truthfully, it had been just under two hours, but Riley was impatient and the dim glow from their flashlights was pressing on her sanity. She had to fight the urge to stop dead in her tracks and listen every time she convinced herself that she heard something, and felt no small amount of embarrassment about her quiet fear of shadows and bumps in the dark. This is not something that she would ever think out loud or even silently acknowledge, but her own mortality had been demonstrated to her less than two weeks ago, and she couldn’t shake that newfound insecurity. 

After about the sixth time she managed to scare herself, she broke the silence;  
“About how much farther until we’re out of the QZ?” She tried to phrase it as casually as possible, but her half whispers echoing off the walls of the tunnel around them ruined any lightheartedness. 

“Not far. We would’ve been out about an hour ago if the tunnels weren’t winding us around our ass to get to our elbow, but trying to move you across the surface wasn’t worth the hour it might have saved us” the woman up front, Nichols she believed, answered.

“Oh”. She was going to elaborate, but Nichols stuck one hand up and pressed the other to her lips in a shushing motion. 

Riley promptly slammed her mouth shut and hovered her hand over the pistol in her waistband, listening closely. She strained to hear, and just when she thought that she wasn’t the only one that was a little jumpy, her blood ran cold. She heard it; the telltale choking and chirping of a clicker. Farther off, sure, but still a serious problem. 

“What direction are they coming from Garcia?” Bingham asked the man behind Riley in a hushed voice.

He narrowed his eyes and listened carefully, face screwed up in a grimace that somehow spoke of both anxiety and annoyance in equal measure. Upon hearing the telltale clicks moving closer, he grit his teeth and answered.

“Fuck”, he half choked, “they’re in front of us”.

The entire team visibly tensed, and Riley felt a fire rush through her chest as her stomach turned to lead and sank. She couldn’t even get away from runners, how could she handle a pack of clickers? With bile burning in her throat, she ventured to ask:

“So…what do we do? We need to go that way, right?” Riley whispered with a forced urgency, hiding the fearing threatening to spill over into her breathing. “Do we go around?”

“We’re too close to the exit to circle back to another marked route, and an unmarked route is out of the question. We’ll never find our way out again…”, Nichols responded. “Garcia, we have to push forward.”

The man nodded his agreement, and that seemed to be the end of the discussion. He looked at Riley.  
“Keep formation, move slowly, and use your gun as an absolute last resort. We can’t afford to draw attention from any direction right now.”  
Giving a single head jerk of acknowledgement, Riley pulled her gun out and got ready to move. The rest of the escort team followed suit, and they started the slow creep forward.  
•

The clicks kept coming with more frequency, and the noise was only amplified by the long empty tunnels. The echoes made it hard to tell what direction the noise was coming from, and the tension in the air was so palpable that it hung over Riley like a physical weight. Then they heard the shuffling, nearby. 

Riley had to stop herself from audibly gasping as no less that 3 clickers came into view, blocking their path directly. Burning cold erupted from her core to every nerve in her body, and she was at a loss. Would they have to go back after all? They were so close to the exit that the tunnel had actually started to lighten a little with the moonlight. There was no way in hell that she was turning back now!  
It was at this moment that Riley made the executive decision to take her chances. Picking up a nearby brick in her shaking right hand, she took careful aim…and completely missed her target. Ellie had always been the better brick thrower. Said brick clattered off of the wall directly to the right of the nearest clickers head, sending all three into a frenzy. Fuck. Riley was not known for her careful decisions, but she would be beating herself up about this one for a while.

If looks could kill, Riley was sure that she would have dropped dead. The two women in front of her were clearly pissed that she had taken the initiative, but seemed to have an idea of what she was going for. Looking back at Garcia, who had elected to take up the rear, Bingham and Nichols made a series of gestures that were too quick for Riley to catch. The man gently pushed Riley behind him, and raised his hand in a silent countdown. Riley caught on fairly quick; They were planning to stun their perspective targets, and rush in to finish them off with their knives. Ideally, nice and quiet. 

As the three rushed forwards, having hit their marks with trained precision (Riley was NOT embarrassed), She stood upright and on standby in the event that someone needed help. She never thought she could be so happy to hear the dying gurgles and gags that followed. She was halfway through her congratulatory thumbs up when she was jerked backwards by her collar.  
Giving a shout of surprise and yanking away, Riley was caught by the chain of her tags. She quickly pulled out the knife from her pocket and started stabbing blindly over her shoulder in a panic, choking as her necklace tightened around her throat. There was a loud bang that reverberated off of the walls and left her ears ringing, followed by the sweet flow of air. She felt the chain around her neck give way as the body of the infected behind her fell to the ground. She was visibly shaking, and bleeding from her shoulder. 

Garcia approached and grabbed a hold of her face, as if to refocus her  
“Hey, are you with me? Are you hurt?”

Riley regained her senses and noticed Bingham holding up her gun, still in shock.  
“Y-yeah, I’m good. I’m good. I think I got bit again though.”

Nichols, having been briefed with the others earlier in the day, knew that this was not detrimental and promptly opened her med kit. Riley, trying to regain control of her trembling limbs, took the water that was offered to her (by whom she couldn’t tell) and used the pale moonlight slipping into the tunnel from the nearby drain grate to wash her new bite. It was, at the very least, shallow and not as obvious as her first one. Just a graze, really, and she supposed she had Bingham to thank for that. 

After allowing Nichols to apply gauze to the freshly cleaned wound, Riley pulled her shirt back over her shoulder, and the four looked to the exit. She was reveling in the feeling of relief, and watched as Garcia and Bingham gently pried the grate open. Bingham was just ushering her through from behind when Garcia’s brain was promptly spattered into Riley’s hair.

Soldiers.  
•

Unable to handle the overhead weight of the grate by herself, Nichols buckled, and the grate slammed into Riley’s bad shoulder. Letting out a scream of pain, Riley hit the ground hard as the grate slammed shut behind her. Grabbing her now MORE shoulder, she tried to rise to her feet while pointedly avoiding the sight Garcia’s ruined face, only to be kicked back to her knees by another soldier.

The soldier that had shot Garcia used the barrel of his gun to lift the tags from the previously living man’s unmoving chest. “Fucking fireflies, I knew it. Confirm the other two.”

And so, holding down an obscenity-screaming Nichols with a foot to the back, they found her tags and weapons. 

The woman who was holding her pointed a handgun at her head. “Shut the fuck up, terrorist bitch!”.

The gunshot sounded off before Riley could screech her protest, and Nichols had stopped struggling. She was dead, which meant that they were moving on to her next. Riley found that she didn’t have the control left to fight, the shock left her numb and muttering something that might have been “why”, over and over. Not to anyone in particular, but rather at what moment of failure had led to the unfortunate circumstances she now found herself in.

“No tags, no weapons either. Civilian maybe? She IS pretty young.”  
Riley wasn’t sure which faceless monster had spoken, but it did register with her what they had said. Her tags were torn off in the sewer only 15 feet away, but what the fuck happened to her gun? She wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. 

“I’m not a Firefly! I swear! I-” She was cut off by the angry women that had murdered Nichols.

“Shut the fuck up! Hartford, check her”

Oh shit. This was it; she had finally fucked up for the last time. She would ring up as positive, they would hold her down, and blow her brains out through her face. This was what she HAD been thinking, before shots rang out in quick succession and three bodies dropped. What she was thinking after was more along the lines of "why am I alive?"

The answer was Bingham, who was still in the drain after it slammed shut. And from the looks of it, she was holding Riley’s gun. 

Riley slowly became aware of the woman trying to get her attention from the other side.  
“KID, GO!”

Riley stumbled to her feet, clutching her injured shoulder, “Wait, we can lift-”

“No,” Said Bingham gesturing behind her, “we can’t. They’re coming.”.  
It was then that Riley heard the runners screaming their hunger behind the woman, and coming fast from the sound of it.

“GO”. 

Riley wasn’t willing to argue, she could hear more soldiers ever closer, likely drawn in by the gunshots just like the runners were. Muttering her apologies, she took one last look at the woman who had saved her life not once, but twice, before sprinting to shelter from the incoming lights. 

Bingham lifted the gun, and Riley only heard one more shot. 

She would have to get herself to Albany.


End file.
